PLThomasEdD: Zais lacks experience, expertise

Blogger PLThomasEdD, who posts at DailyKos, published another great commentary there yesterday, this one taking Superintendent Mick Zais to task for his claims in an opinion-editorial in The State.

I hope readers will share PLThomasEdD's commentary far and wide among educators, because he's precisely the sort of education leader that's missing from government: Experienced, expert and circumspect.

South Carolina's Superintendent of Education Mick Zais makes several claims in The State (March 25, 2012) that build on one central argument: "The most important information about teachers isn’t the degrees they have or their years of seniority. Their effectiveness in the classroom matters much, much more."

Like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Zais has no experience teaching children in K-12 public education. This complete lack of teaching experience and degrees in the field of education is a suspect position from which to claim that these two characteristics do not matter. In fact, political appointees and elected officials sit in unique positions often above both accountability (the mantra du jour of the political elite regarding education) and qualifications—unlike the real world markets they often praise.

Since the early 1980s, U.S. public education has been experimenting with accountability, standards, testing, and school report cards. In 2012, every single state as well as educational leaders at the federal level have declared those public schools failures or inadequate.

Zais's solution to this dynamic echoes the national argument now facing our public schools:

Accountability, standards, testing, and school report cards have failed, they argue, thus the solution is more and different accountability, standards, testing, and report cards!

This complete failure in logic and context resonates only with those without the exact qualities Zais and Duncan reject—teaching experience and formal preparation in teaching and learning.

I have taught now for 28 years, including 18 years teaching public high school English in rural SC. What has benefited me most in those years teaching?

Without question, the single greatest contribution to my effectiveness as a teacher has been experience. I am significantly superior today to the teacher I was nearly 3 decades ago, and I am certain I am now a pale version of what I'll be in the coming decade.

Inextricable from the importance of experience are my degrees in education and my scholarship over my career.

In what profession does experience and knowledge of the field not matter? Do we want medical doctors without experience and education in medicine? Airplane pilots without experience flying planes?

But our elected and appointed education leaders are not alone in this total lack of credibility to portray education accurately or to pose solutions needed for our persistent challenges to teach and learn in our public schools. Political leadership would have much less power and influence if our media took the responsibility to challenge and confront the repeated false claims and hollow solutions coming from our state and federal government concerning schools.

Secretary Duncan and Superintendent Zais, for example, are allowed the bully pulpit of their positions, without regard to their lack of experience or expertise. As a result, the public is fed a continuous stream of misinformation and jumbled logic. Let's consider a few in Zais's commentary.

• Teacher experience and degrees do not matter, but classroom effectiveness does? This claim falls apart when we examine what constitutes classroom effectiveness. Ample research shows that teacher effectiveness includes significant correlations with experience and degrees (see HERE), thus the initial claim poses a false dichotomy and a disturbing lack of awareness of the field of education.

• Measuring teacher effective on fixed test scores is a failure but value added methods solve that problem? Again, this is a common-sense sounding argument that has power among those who haven't taught and those without knowledge of the field. But the overwhelming patterns of evidence concerning VAM-style teacher and school accountability, even by those advocating the practice, show that VAM is unstable and not a credible avenue for guiding accountability policy. [1]

• School report cards fail because they have used "ambiguous terms," but new report cards will work because they will label schools with A through F ratings? This is the most troubling and illogical argument I have seen recently. How is an "A" less ambiguous than "Met"? Both require that anyone wanting to know what either means has some sort of rubric for how this singular notation captures some set of criteria. The problem is not the labeling format, but the act of labeling and the failure to acknowledge that all labeling and ranking systems used to sort children, teachers, and schools overwhelmingly reflect the status of the student's life outside of the control of the student, teacher, or school. Test-based data remain in 2012 a proxy for the socioeconomic conditions of any child's life more so than an accurate representation of teaching or learning.*

And this leads to a final similarity between Zais and Duncan. In Zais's commentary, he fails to acknowledge or mention poverty even once (although SC sits in the bottom quartile of affluence in the nation)—just as Duncan is apt to do in his many speeches.

The unacknowledged truth about education in SC and across the U.S. is that schools that struggle are burdened by the weight of poverty and too often fail to confront social inequity by perpetuating inequity through policies such as standardized testing, tracking students, and disproportionate disciplinary practices.

Leadership without expertise is no leadership at all, and it leads only to more troubling and ironic conclusions. Zais ends his commentary with: "Student learning is at the heart of accountability and educator evaluation. Our new evaluation system puts students first. It has the potential to transform education in South Carolina."

Yes, if the new evaluation system is mandated, transformation will occur, that is if we are willing to consider destroying teacher autonomy and morale, student engagement and deep understanding, and public school stability as transformation.

[1] See Bruce Baker's detailed examinations of value-added methods at School Finance 101. Also note that Dr. Baker has experience and formal training in the areas about which he presents information.

* Leaders without experience, preparation, or scholarship in the field of education have neither current nor historical context for their claims. Even a cursory examination of the Poverty Index and school report cards used in SC reveal the powerful connection between poverty and measurable student outcomes. This same dynamic is revealed in the data from the College Board in every single year the SAT has been administered as well.

Ravitch: Who demeans teachers harms children

Diane Ravitch, who would be U.S. Secretary of Education in a perfect world, commented this week on the Metlife Survey of the American Teacher in her weekly blog at Education Week magazine's website.

As usual, the logic of her commentary is crystalline.

By now, you have seen the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher. It shows that teachers' satisfaction with their job has plummeted since 2009, from 59 percent to 44 percent. It is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of teachers who are likely to leave the profession has grown from 17 percent to 29 percent since 2009.

The reasons are obvious: The most satisfied teachers feel their jobs are secure, and they are treated as professionals by the community. Compared with dissatisfied teachers, they are more likely to have opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, and greater parental involvement in their schools. These are teachers working in an atmosphere of professionalism and collaboration.

The teachers who are most dissatisfied are in schools that have been hard hit by budget cuts, layoffs, larger classes, fewer resources, and a loss of time for or outright elimination of the arts, foreign languages, or physical education. At the same time that funding has been cut, there has been an upsurge in students' need for health and support services, which are less available to them.

Teachers are feeling the impact of state budget cuts, for sure.

But they are also feeling the chill wind stirred up by Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, which demands that teachers must be evaluated in some degree by the test scores of their students. In many states, those evaluations are as much as 50 percent, and that 50 percent trumps the other 50 percent. Teachers know, almost instinctively, that this is misguided, and Linda Darling-Hammond's recent Commentary in Education Week shows that this is a flawed idea with no support in research. The debacle in New York City, where teachers were ranked according to their value-added rating, showed what a misleading and pernicious tool this is, and how many teachers will be wrongly labeled and publicly humiliated.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

As the fight against job security for teachers continues to gather steam, I turned to historian Jeffrey Mirel of the University of Michigan for advice. Jeff has been writing about the teaching profession for many years. He is a wise and deeply knowledgeable expert. I understand, as Jeff does, that tenure is mis described these days. University professors have a lifetime guarantee of employment when they win tenure. It is not the same in K-12 education, even though critics confuse the public by saying so. Teachers in K-12 schools do not have a lifetime guarantee; what they have is a guarantee of due process if someone wants to fire them. The right to a hearing, the right to be presented with evidence against them. When did that become un-American?

I asked Jeff Mirel to describe the argument for tenure for K-12 teachers, and this was his reply:

"I think the traditional reasons for tenure (i.e., to keep public schools as free as possible from becoming stages for political manipulation and to enable high-quality, career-minded teachers to stay in the classroom for as long as possible) are still good. What has changed is the context these positions must be argued in.

For example, in the first case—politicization of curriculum—it is impossible to imagine a time when tenure protection is more vital than now. The country is so divided that on any given school day teachers can be denounced, "tried," and fired over an amazingly wide range of issues (e.g., discussing the age of the earth, accuracy of the theory of evolution, the appropriateness of reading Huck Finn, what the Founders meant by the separation of church and state, the effectiveness of the New Deal, or what Shakespeare meant when he wrote in "Romeo and Juliet:" "... the bawdy hand of the dial is now on the prick of noon." (Act II, Scene 4). That last one actually happened when I was teaching the play to 9th graders in the late 1970s—one very sharp kid asked me about it after class—I had tenure so I was not too worried about explaining it to him but I began by saying, "What do you think Shakespeare is saying?" The young man told me what he thought, I told him he was probably right, and he walked away shaking his head in amazement.

Given all that, tenure is a crucial protection for teachers and a crucial part of getting students to be literate, critical thinkers,and engaged citizens.

The second case, tenure helping good teachers stay in field—you're right on this in your review of Wendy Kopp's book. If the goal of getting excellent teachers to stick around for 20 or 30 years, then they need tenure protection in no small part because they are NEVER going to get paid what they are worth financially. Without tenure, teaching school cannot compete in the economic marketplace (e.g., I know people in the business world who have only a B.A. in business and, after 10 years in the field, are making 2.5-3 times what public school teachers are making. Without good job protection we will never have long term, high quality teachers in our classrooms.

So, I think tenure is necessary, but it also must be accompanied by ways to remove bad, tenured teachers—figuring that out is more difficult than why we should have tenure in the first place."

What is happening to teachers now across this nation is a disgrace. The attacks on them are a blot on our nation. Teachers and students are not different interest groups. Anyone who demeans teachers demeans education and hurts children.

Diane

Popular versus expert: Who should be trusted in education?

Blogger PLThomasEDD, who posts at DailyKos and elsewhere, has shined a light on a significant topic in his most recent note: Should education be governed by individuals who happen to have amassed certain popularity or by individuals who have earned expertise in the field?

This hits my sweet spot, as I have noted here many, many times that in our blessed state, public education is governed wholly and exclusively by individuals who have no specific expertise or experience in public education.

I recently spoke at the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) conference in Columbia, SC, charged with the daunting task of speaking on the conference theme, "The Role of Technology in Public Education," while using technology to argue that education needs to heed strong cautions about the lure of technology.

At one of the keynote talks, another speaker ended his presentation by highlighting what he feels is the next wave of educational innovation—Khan Academy.

Just a couple days later, Khan popped up again on a segment of 60 Minutes.

At this intersection of technology, education, and media, I have to note that Sal Khan and his new wave of video-based education has something striking in common with Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, Bill Gates as education entrepreneur, and Michelle Rhee as draconian education administrator.

First, let's consider how Duncan, Gates, Rhee, and Khan attained their status as educators, educational leaders, and educational reformers.

Secretary of Education Duncan walked the path of appointment to his status in education.

Peter Smagorinsky puts it best:

"Let’s trace his path to the presidential Cabinet. One of Duncan’s childhood friends, John Rogers, appointed Duncan director of the Ariel Education Initiative in Chicago. Duncan’s directorship led to Ariel’s reincarnation as a charter school, following which Duncan was advanced in the Chicago Public School system from deputy chief of staff to chief executive officer. Note that he worked exclusively at the executive level, never stooping to teach classes or learn about schools except from an operational perspective."

How about Bill Gates? This one is easy, to become an education expert or education reformer, Gates amassed billions of dollars, which apparently equates with expertise in any field he so chooses.

And Michelle Rhee? Bypass the education establishment by not receiving any degrees in education, become a leader by entering the classroom through TFA, teach three years, and then attain your credibility by firing teachers and creating an education system built on fraudulent test data.

This brings us back to Sal Khan—whose wikipedia page identifies him as an "American educator."

Pretty impressive considering he, like Rhee, Duncan, and Gates, has no degrees in education, and like Duncan and Gates, has no experience teaching.

Sal Khan got tired of his day job, started tutoring his relatives, made some videos, and now is a full-fledged educator. And according to CBS, he may be the future of education.

Ironically, Khan and his academy do offer us a powerful lesson about education and education reform, a lesson repeated by Duncan, Gates, and Rhee:

The cult of personality can garner you public fame and accolades as an educator and reformer, but that notoriety is all glitz, ultimately causing more harm than good.

Let me return to my recent talk at CEFPI. Throughout the day, I noticed that speakers and participants at this conference—primarily architects, technology experts, engineers, and administrators—argued for the use of technology to support individualized, student-centered instruction as well as project-based learning.

Two things are interesting about this pattern.

The participants and speakers appeared to believe that those ideas (individualized, student-centered instruction and project-based learning) were innovative, personified by the "new wave" ideas of Khan. (I am always fascinated that people who have no background or experience in education can trust that ideas generated outside of education have somehow never been considered by educators.)

During the final panel presentation at the conference, I noted two things for the participants and speakers.

First, I clarified that teachers have never made policy decisions for education in the U.S. If education has failed, as most people claim, that failure isn't the result of decisions made by educators.

Second, I informed them that individualized, student-centered learning and project-based learning were championed by John Dewey a century ago and popularized by William Heard Kilpatrick in the 1930s.

Khan, I added, is not being innovative, if, in fact, his video-based learning is advocating what they claim. But beyond that, Khan has no expertise as an educator.

Khan has been a stellar student (if we can trust wikipedia), but that doesn't make someone an educator any more than being a stellar athlete assures that person can coach. Or that being a frequent flyer qualifies a person to pilot a plane.

Khan's plan for education fails also on many other levels:

• Prepackaging content insures a static approach to knowledge and understanding. This is the essential failure of the "banking concept" of education denounced by Paulo Freire.

• Focusing on content leaves the student out of any decision making concern what should be learned and why. Teaching is reduced to a service industry and students are, then, just passive and thoughtless customers.

• Video lectures are essentially little different than a textbook, and thus carry the same traditional limitations textbooks do.

• More and more genuine experts who are examining Khan's videos are exposing that the content is often of a low quality; the videos may be engaging, but accuracy is being sacrificed.

In the big picture, Khan, again, is showing what is essentially wrong with U.S. public education and the perennial move to reform it: We are trapped in the cult of personality and ignoring the enormous wealth of expertise that exists in the classrooms of K-12 school and universities across the U.S.

The cult of personality is a self-serving dynamic. In the current personality-based education reform movement, Duncan, Gates, Rhee, and Khan are all feeding their own aggrandizement.

Theirs is not about democracy or student autonomy or teacher professionalism.

With the death of U.S. public education, the cult of personality is also sacrificing expertise.

Teachers as professionals, teachers as experts are enduring. Expertise deserves our attention.

An officer but no gentleman: Zais attacks Inez Tenenbaum

To the best of my memory, former Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum started her career as a classroom teacher, then became a lawyer specializing in children's advocacy, then was elected superintendent of education in 1998 and was re-elected in 2002.

In fact, I believe Tenenbaum was so popular a state superintendent that she collected more votes than anyone else running statewide in 2002, and was the only Democrat elected statewide the year that Mark Sanford defeated Jim Hodges.

I recall hearing Tenenbaum say, time after time, that South Carolina's curriculum standards were already among the highest in the nation before the Bush administration imposed its so-called "No Child Left Behind" on South Carolina and the other 49 states.

And I recall that it wasn't only Tenenbaum saying it, but Education Week magazine consistently ranked South Carolina's standards high.

So I was shocked to learn that the fellow currently occupying the superintendency, Mick Zais, has unleashed a scorched-earth attack on Tenenbaum on the very subject that Tenenbaum was strongest: High standards.

Zais's new attack against a predecessor -- and, by the way, the woman who presently serves the nation as Consumer Product Safety Commissioner, ensuring that consumer products are manufactured to higher safety standards -- came as part of a diatribe against U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Now, just to review, during the same period of time that Tenenbaum was a classroom teacher and a lawyer specializing in children's advocacy, Zais collected an engineering degree from West Point Academy, masters and doctorate degrees in social psychology and organizational behavior from the University of Washington, and other degrees from military training programs, and served in a variety of Army commands on bases around the world.

According to his official biography, Zais's total experience in a classroom has been three years as "assistant professor" at West Point Academy, teaching "organizational behavior, leadership, and management consulting" to West Point cadets, not such basic -- and tested -- subjects as language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, et cetera, to South Carolina public schoolchildren.

So, armed with that awareness, here's what I read of Zais's screed to Duncan, in which he lambasted Tenenbaum and her successor, lifelong educator and former Columbia College president Jim Rex.

“Let me be crystal clear: South Carolina’s standards were lowered through an organized effort by former Democratic State Superintendents of Education Inez Tenenbaum and Jim Rex, the State Board of Education, the Education Oversight Committee, and taxpayer-funded education lobby groups. Their intent was to hide the true performance of our schools from students, parents, and taxpayers.”

“The governance of South Carolina’s system of education is too fragmented. Parents and taxpayers don’t need more unaccountable boards in Columbia; they need leaders willing to take principled stands to transform education so every student receives a personalized and customized education, not an inflexible, standardized one. That is my mandate from the voters.”

Zais continued, “Under my proposal for flexibility from certain provisions of No Child Left Behind, South Carolina would implement a new system of accountability that would grade schools from A through F, something every student and parent can understand. The proposal would set high and achievable standards for every student in every school. I look forward to submitting this proposal by February 28 and working with the U.S. Department of Education to gain approval of the State’s waiver request.”

“As State Superintendent of Education, it is my goal to raise standards as new statewide assessments are implemented in the next few years. History has shown, and President Obama’s Administration has confirmed, the education establishment in South Carolina and their lobbyists cannot be trusted.”

Zais concluded, “I call on all students, parents, and taxpayers to hold those responsible for lowering standards to account, and to stand with my allies and me as we work to transform education in South Carolina. Now is the time to put students first. That is my calling; that is my charge to keep.”

Words of an angry man, to be sure.

So the blame for Zais's inability to command a population that never sought to be commanded rests at the feet of Inez Tenenbaum and Jim Rex, whose primary crime was to advocate for South Carolina's public schoolchildren in times when state and federal lawmakers imposed standards and accountability without sufficient resources, through the old Education Accountability Act of 1998 and No Child Left Behind of 2001.

I would suggest -- and I'm surprised that the superintendent, with his degree in social psychology and certainly his awareness of a concept called "projection," wouldn't recognize this -- that he may be projecting his own negative emotion and feelings of incapacity upon his more-popular predecessors who, for all of their imperfections, retained a measure of trust from the state's community of professional educators because all knew that Tenenbaum and Rex had lived, breathed, walked in the shoes of those professions throughout their careers.

Leading troops in Vietnam, Korea, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo clearly were monumental tasks, worthy of respect and admiration. But here, in quite a different theater of public service, it is conduct unbecoming a state superintendent to lash out at a woman whose service in the same position position ended more than five years ago. What benefit does one gain from attacking her?

I'm not sure -- I suspect that the vast, and let me say again, vast majority of education professionals are not sure -- that a career in military service, capped by a decade presiding over a small private college, really represents a "calling" to lead a state's public education system. Certainly, voters elected one candidate over another, and the office is occupied, but let's not fall off into hyperbole.

Preside over a classroom of seventh-graders who aren't quite as motivated and disciplined as, let's say, West Point cadets for 29 years, and the vast majority of education professionals would likely not flinch when one claims a "calling" and a "charge to keep" in leading public education.

Have the grace to refrain from ad hominem political attacks on predecessors of the opposite party -- as I noticed the good general didn't reach so far back in his anger as to bruise Superintendent Barbara Nielson -- and at the very least, no one would question one's sense of decorum as the executive officer of an agency in the state that birthed the code duello, Wade Hampton and the glistening swoon.

Tough as nails and committed as a prize fighter, Inez Tenenbaum is still a lady, an ever rarer sort in the Haley Age.

And no matter how badly one grinds one's teeth, a gentleman in South Carolina never attacks a lady.

And over her standards.